The present invention relates generally to databases, and more particularly to systems and methods for creating and displaying custom tab and tab set objects for use in a multi-tenant and/or multi-application database system.
In multi-tenant database systems, such as the salesforce.com service, a multi-tenant architecture is used wherein customer organizations (i.e., tenants) share applications and data, and database resources in one logical database. The database tables themselves are typically shared. For example, each entity in the data model typically contains an organization_id column that distinguishes rows for each tenant. All queries and data manipulation in the context of a tenant filter on this (indexed) organization_id column to ensure proper security and the appearance of virtual private databases. In the salesforce.com system, for example, this strategy is used to expose standard entities such as Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity entities to customers.
However, customers may wish to add their own custom objects and applications to the system in addition to the standard objects and standard applications already provided. In a traditional client/server application, where the customer has its own physical database, adding custom objects is typically done via DDL (data definition language) against that database to create new physical schema—tables and columns. In an online multi-tenant database system, such as the salesforce.com service, this approach may be untenable for various reasons. For example, for a database system with a large population of tenants (e.g., on the order of 1,000 or 10,000 or more tenants), the union of all desired schema would overwhelm the underlying data dictionary catalog (e.g., Oracle dictionary). Additionally, the maintenance of all of these schema objects would be a nearly impossible burden for DBAs (database administrators). Further, current relational databases do not support online DDL (in a highly concurrent transactional system) well enough for organizations to remain logically independent. Specifically, the creation of schema by one organization could lock an application for all other customers causing unacceptable delays.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/817,161, entitled “Custom Entities and Fields in a Multi-Tenant Database System” filed on Apr. 2, 2004, which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety, discloses systems and methods for creating and customizing objects such as entities and fields. The systems and methods presented therein offer a flexible approach to storing variable schema data in a fixed physical schema so as to overcome the above and other problems.
However, in addition to providing the ability to create custom database objects such as entities and fields, it would be desirable to provide a sharing model that allows users to easily and conveniently share such standard and custom objects and applications among users or groups of users. The sharing model should allow users to create custom views that provide user access to various objects and application elements. Such sharing model should also provide individual users the ability to customize individual views of the model so as to provide a more convenient, user-friendly database and application user interface environment to the user.